What are best practices for handling special characters when copying text from external sources into a PHP application?

When copying text from external sources into a PHP application, it is important to properly handle special characters to prevent issues like SQL injection or display problems. One common approach is to use PHP's htmlspecialchars() function to convert special characters to their HTML entities, ensuring they are safely displayed in the application. 

// Example of handling special characters when copying text from external sources
$externalText = $_POST['external_text']; // Assuming the text is coming from a form input

// Sanitize the input by converting special characters to HTML entities
$sanitizedText = htmlspecialchars($externalText);

// Now you can safely use $sanitizedText in your application
echo $sanitizedText;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities mb_convert_encoding UTF-8 encoding

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